Remembering Peter Sellers, the outstanding comic actor of his time

By D.B.

PETER SELLERS died 40 years ago, aged only 54, yet his reputation endures in a way many of his peers’ have not. It is hard to think of any British comic actor—indeed, any Western comic actor at all—of his era who remains so celebrated. But then, none had his uncanny improvisational ability or his astonishing range: the result, he always claimed, of having no real character of his own.

The BBC, which in 1995 gave three episodes of its flagship “Arena” arts programme over to an exhaustive documentary on Sellers—most subjects are covered in one—still considers him a sufficiently important figure for a substantial new film. “Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy” concentrates chiefly on Sellers’s personal life, to which his career is presented as a backdrop. One effect of this is to show what a relatively small proportion of his films have stood the test of time—or passed muster even in their own day. Soon after Sellers’s death, Tom Shale, a critic, observed that there could be few “good actor[s] who ever made so many bad movies as Sellers, a comedian of great gifts but ferociously faulty judgment”.

“A State of Comic Ecstasy” highlights the very good, to emphasise what an extraordinary talent Sellers possessed, as well as the very bad, to illustrate how vanity and poor choices intertwined with his distressing family life to diminish him. His most famous role, and the one which made him a global star—Inspector Clouseau, the maladroit French detective from the “Pink Panther” series (pictured)—is mentioned all but in passing, as if it was scarcely worthy of him. This is unfair on those performances; like Steve Martin, who succeeded him in the role, Sellers could move between sophisticated humour and broad slapstick and make each a thing of comic beauty.

Another striking aspect of Sellers’s films is how they would fall foul of today’s standards. Sellers made his name through his gift for voices—beginning with his standout turns on “The Goon Show”—and often these included national and racial stereotypes. Jacques Clouseau was one such; perhaps the next best remembered is his Indian stock character, whom he depicted in “The Millionairess” (1960) opposite Sophia Loren, again in “The Party” (1968) and repeatedly in comic songs on record.

You might think this would make him a prime candidate to be, in today’s parlance, cancelled. Yet his Indian parody was remarkably popular with, well, Indians and others from the subcontinent. Hanif Kureishi, a writer, appears in the new BBC film to recall how his Pakistani father and white English mother delighted in seeing their relationship reflected thus on screen, despite Sellers’s brownface. The title of “Goodness Gracious Me”, a breakout British Asian television sketch comedy, was a reference both affectionate and acidic to Sellers, taken from the comic song he and Ms Loren recorded to cash in on their hit film. This writer has seen British Asian friends nearly fall off the sofa with happy laughter at Sellers’s cod-Indian spoof of the “My Fair Lady” number “Wouldn't It Be Loverly”. Moreover, both the doctor in “The Millionairess” and the actor in “The Party” are, in the end, the heroes of the day; they are honourable, kind and sincere, and the joke is on those who underestimate and condescend to them.

Sellers’s attitude to women, both on and off the screen, is less defensible. “A State of Comic Ecstasy” shows how there was not much to choose between the real Sellers and his eponymous character in “Hoffman” (1970, a non-comic role), who attempts to blackmail a much younger woman into a relationship, or Clare Quilty, one of the predatory men, whom he plays in Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” (1962). Sellers, who was well into his 30s when stardom arrived, was a serial wooer, manipulator and controller of ingenues, most famously Britt Ekland, a Swedish actress.

Sellers portrayed Quilty as a man of many disguises, which amounted to multiple roles in the same film and became a trademark (he had already accomplished it in 1959 in a surprise international success, “The Mouse That Roared”). “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) was financed on the condition he reprise this device, and it established his standing as a comic actor of peerless ability and dazzling versatility.

It is remarkable to think this early triumph might have been the pinnacle of a crowded filmography that extended another 16 years, had it not been for his penultimate movie. “Being There” (1979) is a film, and a performance, unique in Sellers’s catalogue. He was famed for dead-on caricature and exuberant clowning. But as Chance the gardener (misheard as Chauncey Gardener), the innocent, television-obsessed simpleton around whom increasingly deranged events revolve, he was a pool of stillness. He had spent the decade striving to get the film made; he believed, correctly, it would be his masterpiece, and he identified so closely with Chance that he printed up his own business cards in the name. The “Pink Panther” series made Sellers wealthy and famous in his time. But it is the characters that bookend Clouseau—Dr Strangelove and Chance—which are the nearest guarantee of his immortality as an actor.

“Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy” is available on BBC iPlayer now